Pipe Dream

by Solomon Jones

  “What’s that all about?” Ramirez said, gesturing toward Deveraux as they got into the car.

  “She is awfully quiet, isn’t she?” Hillman said.

  “Too quiet.”

  As they were leaving, a brown-haired man came out of the Roundhouse, walked up to her truck, and stuck his head in the window. Hillman caught a glimpse of him in the rearview mirror when Ramirez turned out of the parking lot.

  “Do me a favor,” Hillman said. “Come back around and ride past Deveraux’s truck again.”

  “Why?”

  “I just saw a cop who matches the description of the man who shot Henry Moore at the hospital.”

  “Where?”

  “He just came out of the Roundhouse to talk to Deveraux.”

  Ramirez stopped the car and threw it into reverse. But he couldn’t back up because there was a line of cars behind him. He put it back in drive, flipped on his dome lights, and went around the block.

  By the time they got back to the parking lot, Deveraux and Morgan were gone. Hillman jumped out of the car and looked around for the reporter, and Ramirez ran into the building and shouted through the glass at the officer standing guard at the desk.

  “Did you see an officer with brown hair and a bushy mustache wearing black pants and a gray blazer?”

  “Sure, he just left,” the officer said.

  “Who is he?”

  “That’s Lieutenant Morgan from Internal Affairs. He should be . . .”

  Ramirez was out the door before the officer could finish. He didn’t hear the reporters yelling after him. He didn’t see the officers walking in and out of the building. He didn’t even see Hillman when he jumped back into the car. All he saw was the truth, forming itself from bits and pieces in his mind, like a mosaic.

  “Did you see her?” Ramirez asked.

  “No. Did you see the cop?”

  “No. But I found out who he is. His name is Lieutenant Morgan, Internal Affairs.”

  Ramirez gunned the car and skidded out of the parking lot, wheels spinning against asphalt as he drove toward the Command Center.

  Before they were two blocks from the Roundhouse, his phone rang.

  “Lieutenant Ramirez, please.”

  “This is Ramirez.”

  “Lieutenant Ramirez, this is Eldridge Scott. A woman just called me and said she was from Homicide.”

  “Okay,” Ramirez said.

  “Well, I don’t know whether it was okay or not,” Eldridge said. “I’ll leave that up to you, since you supposed to be the professional.”

  Ramirez held his tongue and prayed for patience.

  “Now, I know y’all got female detectives and everything,” Eldridge said. “And I don’t mean to sound like some kind o’ male chauvinist just because it was a woman callin’, but somethin’ about her just wasn’t right.”

  “Something like what?” Ramirez said, his head bouncing toward the roof of the car as they hit a deep pothole.

  “First of all, she was askin’ me about things I know I already talked to you about,” Eldridge said.

  “Sometimes we ask the same questions over and over again, Mr. Scott, because people forget things sometimes, and the more you ask, the more details you get.”

  “All right, well, since you so sure about it . . .”

  “No, Mr. Scott, it’s not that at all,” Ramirez said, trying not to get on the old man’s bad side. “I’m trying to understand what you’re trying to tell me, that’s all.”

  “I just didn’t think the woman was right,” Scott said. “Now, it’s one thing to ask the same questions over and over again. But she was tellin’ me not to discuss our conversation with anybody, and then she asked me to come down and meet her in the parking lot of the Roundhouse. Now, if the woman was from Homicide, would she be tellin’ me to keep our conversation secret, like she was hidin’ somethin’, and then tell me to meet her outside someplace, instead o’ in her office?”

  The old man made sense. Quickly, Ramirez ran through the names of the people who worked day shift, because he knew there weren’t any female detectives in his squad. Of the twenty-six detectives in the other two squads, he could only think of one female.

  “Mr. Scott?” Ramirez said. “Did the woman give you a name?”

  “She said her name was Deveraux.”

  Ramirez held the phone away from his ear as another piece of the mosaic pushed itself down into the mortar of his mind. It all made sense. Jeannete Deveraux had been waiting in the parking lot for Eldridge Scott. She was going to try to trick him into coming to the Roundhouse and then push a camera in his face. But Morgan had somehow convinced her to leave with him.

  “Thank you, Mr. Scott.”

  “Wait a minute,” Eldridge said before Ramirez could disconnect the call. “Was I right? Was the woman from Homicide?”

  “Well, no, she wasn’t.”

  Eldridge let loose a self-satisfied laugh. “Learn to listen to your elders, boy. We ain’t lived all this time by bein’ fools.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ramirez said, disconnecting the call.

  “Deveraux was waiting for the guy who lives next door to Clarisse Williams,” he said to Hillman.

  “Morgan must have told her that he had a better story,” Hillman said. “Hopefully, it’s not the same type of story he fed to Henry Moore.”

  Ramirez didn’t respond. He knew that Hillman was right. He had been right from the very beginning. Now people were dying because Ramirez had refused to listen to him. It was just like Eldridge Scott had told him: Listen to your elders, because fools don’t usually live that long.

  Lieutenant Darren Morgan looked in his rearview mirror as he turned onto I-76 East and headed for the airport. He half expected to see Jeanette Deveraux and her cameraman take the next exit ramp and go back to the Roundhouse, but when they passed the Gray’s Ferry Avenue exit and switched into the left lane to keep pace with him, he knew he had them. The only problem was figuring out a way to get rid of their news van when he was done.

  It had been pretty easy to convince the reporter that the information he had was better than anything she was going to get standing around in the Roundhouse parking lot waiting on whomever. All he had to do was mention the words “police conspiracy.” From there, it was a piece of cake. He told her that if she promised not to contact anyone at the television station before she had the evidence in hand, he would provide her with the paperwork and photos to prove that the Podres shooting was the result of a wide-ranging police cover-up involving at least two ranking officers. What he didn’t tell her was that he was one of the officers, and the paperwork was nowhere to be found.

  Morgan turned onto the bridge that led to the airport and looked in his rearview mirror again. Then he smiled to himself and wondered what Deveraux and the cameraman were thinking about as they followed him.

  “Do you think it’s safe to come out here with this guy?” Jeanette Deveraux’s cameraman said after they followed Morgan into the airport, through A, B, C, D, and E terminals, around the entire international terminal, and through a hole in the gate at Philadelphia International Airport.

  Deveraux didn’t answer. She was too busy wondering what the cop was going to tell them about the Podres shooting and hoping that whatever information he had was worth disregarding the interview with the couple who lived next door to Clarisse Williams. After all, the illegal search thing would’ve been pretty strong. But if this guy could give names and dates and link the whole thing to the police department, that would be like someone giving Deveraux her own world someplace, to pillage and plunder to her heart’s content.

  The only catch was, there was no way to be sure about the cop. This little excursion could be anything from a delay tactic to some kind of public-relations ploy. Who knew?

  Maybe that’s what was bothering her about this thing. She didn’t know. She’d always pretty much stuck with the “bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” philosophy because it helped her keep things really simple. But
when it came to this, probably the biggest story she’d ever covered, she was willing to risk doing something different. She was willing to toss the dice and risk losing the sure story for the bigger story that she wasn’t so sure about. That’s what Morgan was offering her—something infinitely bigger than anything she’d ever covered. And he hadn’t even asked for anything in return.

  Deveraux watched as Morgan stopped his car a few feet from the high grass at the edge of the airport. But she wasn’t really seeing him, or his car, or the grim expression he wore as he got out and closed his door. She was only seeing a Barbara Walters–like rise to one-woman shows and hour-long specials.

  “Jeanette?” the cameraman said as he got out of the van and pulled his camera from the backseat. “You coming?”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, snapping out of her reverie. “Just let me get my microphone.”

  Deveraux got out and leaned over the backseat just as Morgan walked back toward the news van. She had to rummage through some stuff to get to the microphone, because the wire had tangled on something.

  “Mike,” she said, still looking down at the floor. “Could you come over here and help me get this wire untangled?”

  The cameraman didn’t say anything.

  “Mike, I need you over here now,” she said.

  When he still didn’t answer, Jeanette Deveraux felt something cold run through her. It was like everything she had ever done up until that moment came together and pressed against reality until it burst through the other side. She felt it all over, that something had just happened that would change her whole existence. It was like ice water pouring over her body, but it was something much colder. It was mind-numbing, all-consuming fear.

  Without raising her head, she glanced over at the other side of the van and saw Mike’s hand draped loosely over the camera handle. A smear of blood soiled his sleeve. The rest of his body wasn’t visible, she assumed because it was on the ground next to the van. Jeanette Deveraux’s eyes began to dart wildly from side to side, trying to find where the cop had gone. When she didn’t see him, she clasped her hand over her mouth and willed herself not to scream. That’s when everything came into focus for her.

  The whole thing had been a ruse by this cop to get her out to the airport and kill her. That could only mean one thing—that he was smack-dab in the middle of whatever conspiracy had caused Podres’s death, and he was willing to do anything to keep that conspiracy under wraps.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered, forcing herself to continue rummaging through the backseat until she could think of what she was going to do next.

  She couldn’t hear anything, because the sound of the planes flying overhead drowned out everything, including the gunshot that had killed Mike. She couldn’t see anything, either, because she didn’t dare look up and let the cop know that she saw her cameraman crumpled in a bloodstained heap next to the van. There was only one chance for her, and she was going to take it.

  “I got it, Mike,” Deveraux said as loudly as she could, the tears squeezing out from between her eyelids. “I got the microphone.”

  Before she had even finished saying the words, Jeanette Deveraux turned around and ran away from the van, tumbling toward the hole in the fence that they had driven through a few minutes before. Morgan darted from the other side of the van and ran after her, cursing himself for allowing a woman to get the jump on him.

  Deveraux tripped, put out her hands to steady herself, half crawled, half fell through the opening in the fence, and ran toward an expanse of grass that led to the nearest runway. Morgan ran through the hole after her, gaining momentum as he took aim and squeezed off a shot that missed badly. Deveraux started zigzagging, hoping to make herself a more difficult target. Morgan squeezed off another shot, barely missed, then tripped on a rock and fell down in the grass. When he looked up, Deveraux was about twenty yards away, still running toward the runway.

  Morgan lay there in prone position, calmly took aim, and shot Jeanette Deveraux in the small of her back. When he saw her fall, he looked at his gun, realized that he had squeezed off the last round, and began fumbling in his pockets for another magazine as he got up and walked over to her. Deveraux was still trying to crawl toward the runway when he got there, though she could no longer move her legs.

  “Go to hell,” she said as he came to stand over her.

  Morgan grinned as he watched her writhe back and forth in a sickening pain dance that looked almost like some kind of ritual.

  “I never heard you say anything like that on the news,” Morgan said, panting as he struggled to catch his breath. “Do they let you say stuff like that on the news?”

  Deveraux looked up at him and tried to maintain her defiant demeanor. But the look on his face was too evil to defy. She began to cry uncontrollably, her body bouncing up and down on the patches of weather-beaten grass like a doll on the string of some cruel puppeteer.

  “Shut up,” Morgan said, digging into the inside pocket of his jacket after failing to find an extra magazine in the outside pockets.

  “Please,” Deveraux said, sobbing and crawling backward in the grass. “I don’t know anything. I really don’t know anything.”

  Morgan found a magazine and took it out of his pocket.

  “Sure you know something,” Morgan said, slapping the magazine into the gun and chambering the first round. “You know you’re good at your job.”

  His face crinkled into a self-satisfied smile as he continued to tease her.

  “And I know I’m good at mine,” he said. “Now, I don’t know what was in that envelope that woman handed to you back at the Roundhouse, but—”

  “Nothing,” Deveraux said, frantically shaking her head and dragging herself away from him. “There wasn’t anything in the envelope. . . .”

  Morgan kicked Deveraux in the side and she screamed out in pain.

  “Now, what was I saying before I was so rudely interrupted?” Morgan said. “Oh yeah. I remember now. I was asking you what was in the envelope back at the Roundhouse.”

  “A number,” Deveraux said, choking on her words as she struggled to hold back the sobs.

  “Whose number?” Morgan said.

  “The Scotts,” she said. “But they’re harmless. They’re old. They don’t know anything about—”

  Morgan bent down and slapped her across the head with the barrel of the gun. She winced and let out a strangled sob as a trickle of blood oozed from beneath her hairline.

  “Where’s the envelope?” he said.

  Deveraux coughed and choked on the blood that was starting to well up in her mouth.

  “Where’s the envelope!” Morgan screamed, his eyes bulging as he reared back to pistol-whip her again.

  “It’s in my purse,” she said, clutching at the cut on her forehead. “It’s in . . .”

  Deveraux lost consciousness and fell against the ground. Morgan looked at her for a moment, contemplated leaving her there, then aimed the gun at her head and fired three times. When the reporter’s face was no longer recognizable, he walked back to Deveraux’s GMC Jimmy and found her purse.

  As he looked over at the cameraman, still slumped between his camera and the ground, Morgan’s options became clear to him. Quite simply, he didn’t have any. The only thing he could do was take the money he’d made from the laundering scheme and leave town.

  It should be simple enough to do that. After all, he had anticipated having to leave quickly one day, and he had squirreled away some of the money in a locker at 30th Street Station.

  He didn’t even know how much it was. And he didn’t care. He was sure it would be enough to get him someplace where he could get started. He’d get the rest of the money later, when things cooled down some.

  Sheldon was the one who had killed Podres, so he’d have to take care of the rest of his problems on his own. And if things went sour, Morgan knew that he could always cut a deal to help land the bigger fish.

  But Morgan didn’t plan to let it come to that.
Because there was only one thing in Philadelphia that he planned to catch—a train.

  Captain Sheldon sat in the Command Center and thought about Morgan. He had proved to be Sheldon’s biggest asset and his biggest liability. His intercepting the tape from Moore had kept the truth hidden. But Morgan was a loose cannon who knew too much. And if Morgan had figured out that Sheldon was Podres’s killer, how much longer could Sheldon keep the truth hidden from the rest of the world?

  The unpredictability of it went against Sheldon’s methodical nature. In everything he had ever done, Sheldon had always considered every possibility and made backup plans. But this thing had spun completely out of his control. There were too many intangibles, too many people digging for the truth, too many possibilities to consider, too many mistakes to cover up.

  The longer the suspects remained at large, the more time people had to theorize. Sheldon knew that it was only a matter of time before the conspiracy theory became a serious consideration. And once the truth began to come out, Morgan would turn on him. That is, if he hadn’t done so already.

  Sheldon looked over at Nelson and knew that there was no other way. He would have to leave, because the situation was rapidly collapsing into bedlam. He couldn’t stand by and watch it all come tumbling down on him. He had gone through too much to let that happen.

  “Commissioner Nelson,” he said, standing up and grabbing his jacket from the back of his chair, “I’m going to get something to eat.”

  “Why don’t you send somebody to get it for you? I need you here.”

  “Sir, if I don’t get out of here and get some sunlight, I’m going to turn into a vampire,” Sheldon said, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. “I’m only going across the street. Do you want anything?”

  “No, not right now. But hurry back. Ramirez and Hillman will be here in a few minutes to report on the progress of the investigation.”

  “I’ll only be a minute, sir.”

  As Sheldon walked across the street and climbed into his car—looking back at the Command Center for the last time—he knew that he had to turn on Morgan before Morgan had a chance to turn on him.